This invention relates to automatic control of pneumatic discharge of particulate material from a container.
Normally in pneumatic discharge operations the attendant manually opens and closes lading valves located between a container to be unloaded and a pneumatic discharge conduit used to convey the material away from the container.
This can be time consuming, for example, in unloading a train of a hundred hopper cars in which each car includes three pneumatic discharge outlets.
Furthermore for higher capacity hopper cars it has been proposed to increase capacity of the cars by eliminating the void space between adjacent hoppers and locating a series of relatively small outlets in the bottom of one or two large hoppers. As many as ten (10) or more discharge outlets would be utilized per large hopper. If these discharge outlets were to be manually opened and closed additional railway attendants would be required which would add expense to the unloading operation.